• Erica
• Micah
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/micahwrites/

Topics:

• Puerto Rico branded holiday jams
• Chive drama on Reddit
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1o0j6hq/cutting_a_cup_of_chives_everyday_until_the_reddit/
• How to cure tinnitus (maybe)
• The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46647/the-ballad-of-blasphemous-bill
• In defense of making movies sequels until they're good again

Microtopics:

• Being finished with horrible shit.
• Being in the middle of things forever.
• The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art
• Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo.
• Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show.
• Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games.
• Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter.
• Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King.
• Developing a field system in Puerto Rico.
• Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest.
• A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach.
• Pirate-themed massage.
• Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride.
• Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup.
• Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer.
• Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola.
• Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams.
• Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine.
• Spanish Milk.
• Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time.
• The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee.
• Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit.
• Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long.
• Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord.
• Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives.
• Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives.
• A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.)
• Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives.
• These are the Days of our Chives.
• Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water.
• Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes.
• Phase canceling your tinnitus.
• Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know.
• Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades.
• A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones.
• Why don't we get bass tinnitus?
• Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar?
• The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska.
• The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow.
• Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood.
• Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin.
• Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo.
• Whether they have banjos in Alaska.
• Having fun with the way words sound.
• I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape.
• The Cremation of Sam McGee.
• Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope.
• Making bad art until it becomes good.
• Tremors 3: Back to Perfection.
• A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives.
• Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people.
• Six topics (and Shrieker Island)
• A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler.
• The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting.
• Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4?
• The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away.
• Low pain awareness.
• Chess boxing win/loss ratios.

Support Topic Lords

• Erica
• Judy
  • https://www.tiktok.com/@diluftmensch
  • https://www.tumblr.com/diluftmensch
  • https://bsky.app/profile/diluftmensch.bsky.social

Topics:

• The Pantone college experience
• Why is everyone with superpowers a crime fighter or a criminal
• Sell me on metal utensils
• Grand Avenue, by Ron Koertge
  • https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F10%252F19.html
  • Abridged version: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14373111-Grand-Avenue-by-Ronald-Koertge
• Toothpaste is traditionally spicy

Microtopics:

• Just Judy.
• Telling your friends you love them.
• Taking a break from the Internet and staring at the ceiling.
• Realizing you need to take a break and then trying to figure out what you need to take a break from.
• Doing absolutely nothing for ten minutes.
• People who enjoy meditation explaining that you just need to meditate harder.
• Taking a depressing game and remaking it, reframing it as relaxing.
• Tetromino Chill.
• Asking "do I have the flu?" in French.
• Clicking on a wav file of Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny and thinking "computer music is cool"
• Your college's particular shade of purple.
• The proliferation of this exact shade of purple now that Pantone has made it possible to exactly reproduce a color.
• The reason why can't we tell who's buff and sexy any more.
• Going to college to get sick of a particular color.
• Whether any place is as intensely branded as a college campus.
• What the founding fathers would think of this college campus' branding.
• James Madison inventing the signature duplicator.
• James Madison insisting that his entire family sleep sitting up.
• Colors that you can't use until you really mean it.
• Colors that are not allowed in the bathroom.
• Pantone inventing a way to pee any known color.
• Boom Box Guy.
• The professor with the glasses with two different color lenses who is constantly complaining about JMU Purple.
• Having jaws strong enough to eat bones and eating way more bones than you used to.
• Topics that have been in the bucket since the inception of the bucket.
• Unlimited energy. (Not limited energy.)
• Why isn't Superman using his x-ray vision to watch TV better than anyone?
• Lois Lane wearing superman's shirt.
• Using your x-ray vision to make sure ant colonies aren't siphoning money out of bank vaults.
• Advising strangers on the street that they have an untreated medical condition and they're like "go away creep"
• The spoon doing a catapult move because the handle is too heavy, and flinging chili everywhere.
• Plastic utensils for adults.
• Hitting the age when doctors start saying things like "let's see if we can get a couple more good years out of you"
• Whether the fork ever touches your tongue.
• Ceramic spoons.
• Melamine, the plastic material manufactured on Alf's home planet.
• Handsome Korean wooden spoons.
• Just slurping down a whole bowl of guacamole.
• Everyday Carry Forks.
• Metal utensils: so good, you carry them around.
• Trying to eat a leaf of lettuce with an extremely heavy fork.
• Eating a meal with a pickaxe and a pronged shovel.
• Turning the corner by Señor Fish.
• Different ways to kil for somebody.
• A punch-line that was not set up in the descriptive part of the poem.
• A poem that is a subset of another poem.
• Where is the wacky misunderstanding that I was promised?
• A bumper sticker reading "you just got passed by a bad driver (AI)"
• Slapping the "artificial intelligence" label on everything you write so people blame AI.
• Cinnamon toothpaste and ginger toothpaste.
• Conventionally spicy toothpaste.
• Toothpaste that doesn't taste like anything. (You know, for cats!)
• Spicy tuna toothpaste and black pepper toothpaste.
• Rinsing your mouth with lemon cleanser so your mouth can feel lemon fresh.
• Pure Piperin.
• Tubes: they're for squeezing.
• Phosphoric acid toothpaste.

Support Topic Lords

• Erica
• Jenni

Topics:

• The chaos you missed
• Having a baby is like being assigned a set of hobbies you don't necessarily care about but are expected to engage in full-time
• Do people actually live longer in Greece and Japan or do they just have more pension fraud?
• Too Many Women Become Desperate, by Infinite Sexy Marriage
  • https://bsky.app/profile/infinitesexy.bsky.social/post/3lcxskqdmoc26
• Is it possible to never show your kid Cocomelon and they never demand to be shown Cocomelon or are they gonna find out about it through osmosis

Microtopics:

• Beneficial nematodes: are they really that good?
• How to pronounce "iykyk."
• Singing "beneficial nematodes" to the tune of Hall of the Mountain King.
• Going extreme on the melismas.
• The Saying Hi Chamber.
• Shazam chastising you for singing.
• 100 MIDIs that some Chinese intern threw together in a couple of hours and now every baby is going to grow up with these tunes in their heads.
• Inventing a new way to live that's worse in every respect.
• Having dinner with a friend while grandma puts the kid to bed.
• A baby getting upset because he isn't staring at geometric shapes right now.
• Making sure the baby makes all the right neural connections and not the wrong ones.
• A video of a guy walking down every street in Vice City.
• Twenty minutes of people icing cakes. Not the really fancy cakes, just regular-ass cakes.
• Clutching at your face as the cake icer puts red next to brown.
• Caking Bad.
• A coup amongst the Smithsonian National Zoo's naked mole rats.
• Stabbing your mom with your teeth so that you can breed.
• A horrible skin creature with prehensile chopsticks.
• Eusocial mammals.
• Growing extra vertebrae every time you give birth.
• A Topic Lords field trip to the naked mole rat colony to meet the new queen.
• Intervertebral red shift.
• EBF, EFF and EP.
• Wake windows and contact naps.
• Holding them like a football and making a sandwich and putting the sandwich in the football, and now you're breastfeeding!
• Whether it's ethical to leave your baby at the Burger King or if you need to go fast casual.
• The poop potato who has opinions.
• You gotta draw the line somewhere, and it's sweeping the floor.
• All the things you're not supposed to put in the crib with the baby.
• Replacing your baby with a gerbil because you're not allowed to kiss your baby on the forehead in case you have a cold sore.
• How to tell if a gerbil has been replaced with a similar gerbil.
• Paying $7/month for the NYT crossword but not getting access to the articles so you click on the crossword constructors' notes but you're already at your three free article limit.
• Anthrocyanins.
• Cynical Jim says yes, Regular Jim says maybe.
• The most domesticated mammal: man.
• Small Japanese women having the longest lifespans because they hide in your crawlspace and death cannot find them.
• Old ladies? In my duct work?
• Hoping there are no old ladies living in your duct work because you haven't cleaned in s while and there are probably mold spores in there
• Poop Songs for Roy.
• Thinking of the shrieking old lady as a sonic shower for you duct work.
• The future-episodes channel, where we discuss episodes that may one day exist.
• Remember that time when you retweeted a thing and it turned into a picture of a fish.
• The ransom note on top of peach tarts aesthetic.
• Welcome to lesbianism. Here is your greeting card with peaches.
• Whether reverse image search is bad now or if it was always bad.
• The Poem is Entertaining.
• Speculative fiction about soviets invading.
• The kind of poem you'd read in feminist bookstores in the early 00s.
• Children's YouTube channels full about new wave songs about trucks.
• Showing your child only OG Sesame Street episodes so they can't relate to adults or children their own age and are technically Xennials.
• Xennial Warrior Princess.
• Everything's more true when you're wearing pants.
• The 25th place you can post pictures of your baby.
• The legend of Shrimptaur.
• Hide in the discord and never post.
• Finally writing the tweet that's going to make John Hodgman unfollow you

Support Topic Lords

• John
• Erica

Topics:

• Golden owl pre-post-mortem
  • https://goldenowlhunt.com/
• Twin update: one year later
• Notepad has support for alternative line endings now
• Goodnight Moon (And/or Goodnight Dune?)
  • https://www.firstcry.com/intelli/articles/goodnight-moon-nursery-rhyme/

Microtopics:

• The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord.
• What goes on the lords-only channel.
• The first rule of being a lord.
• It's the end of the show somewhere in the world.
• Frog Fractions Royalty.
• Topic Lords Con East.
• Choosing pairs of lords.
• What lords have been on the show least recently.
• Mystery with a B.
• Responsibility to the lords.
• ARG goings-on.
• Maze of Games.
• Rubber hose ARG solving
• Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck.
• The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France.
• The History of the Owl Stuff.
• Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl.
• The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved.
• It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
• Going and burying a duck
• Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back.
• Looking through the Heart of France.
• Another cursed treasure hunt in the can.
• Ancient alternatives to zip files.
• Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly.
• Telling twins apart using phrenology.
• Twin identification strategies.
• Let me see your flecks!
• Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons.
• Platypodes.
• Jock twin/nerd twin.
• Having children as a way to practice solving problems together.
• Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.)
• Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night.
• Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol.
• How to teach babies to sleep.
• Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it.
• A good selection of kid-friendly music.
• A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes.
• How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed.
• Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV.
• Just show me the byte order marker!
• Adding tabs to Notepad.
• Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar.
• What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect.
• Loading CSV files into R.
• Accidentally updating Excel.
• The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems.
• Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow.
• Why JWZ is no longer rich.
• Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line.
• Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces.
• How Unity handles upgrades and versioning.
• The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon.
• Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon.
• When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died.
• The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things.
• The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre.
• Goodnight Dune.
• Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune.
• Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died."
• Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics.
• Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques.
• Floating in the No-Room.

Support Topic Lords

• Erica
• Casey

Topics:

• Isn't it great to have a coelom?
• Solving problems by waiting for another bigger problem to occur and override the previous problem
• Mammals learning to eat cephalopods
  • https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/16/occasional-paper-when-armor-met-lips/
• A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, by Emily Dickinson
  • https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/a-narrow-fellow-in-the-grass-1096/
• Personal project retrospectives

Microtopics:

• That thing you just heard.
• Assigning your new hire an office.
• Plugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas.
• The Topic Lords Promise.
• A bag that your organs sit in.
• Undifferentiated tissues.
• How dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm.
• Inflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen.
• Organisms with high diseectability.
• The anti-coelom lobby.
• Undifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression.
• The gummy worm future we're all looking forward to.
• Fluid things going on in the organism.
• A car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem.
• Good car ideas.
• A bad thing happening but it's not your fault.
• Buying your house in a point and clock adventure online.
• Rediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house.
• Multi-episode Topic Lords story arcs.
• Which colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag.
• The Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about.
• Serial Podcast Monogamy.
• Podcast guilt.
• Discussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness.
• Non-Stop Coelom Celebration.
• My own very special walking bag of guts.
• Evolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell.
• Losing your baby lips.
• What it's like to eat a planarian.
• Cephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals.
• The giant squid that have never been seen alive.
• The colossal squid vs. the giant squid.
• Finding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest.
• Our flag that represents limpness will be your downfall.
• Non-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea.
• Opening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid.
• Emily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak.
• Being too busy reading to understand what you're reading.
• Whether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both.
• It's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre!
• A polysexual attitude towards nature.
• Emily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme.
• Herman Melville describing Moby Dick as "the Ebon Whale" because he didn't have Wikipedia.
• Moby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong.
• Game Developers doing a "post-mortem" of projects that are ongoing.
• Befunge.
• Clojure and other Lisps.
• Watching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better.
• A huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game.
• Fine-grained tactical mistakes.
• Why people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game.
• The most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world.
• Inventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship.
• Rewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for.
  
• Modern Jim-Style Content.
• Artists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you.
• A sign on your forehead reading "ask me about my severely negative feedback."
• The George W. Bush childhood home.
• A community built on everyone's shared desire to leave.
• The ethic of owning a shotgun.
• The last of the Midland Odessa complaining.
• Big Bend and Carlsbad Caverns.
• An airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories.
• The Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial.
• A plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis.
• Everything's a dick if you squint hard enough.
• An assassin of federal judges.

Support Topic Lords

• Erica
• Kory
  • https://kbones.itch.io/

Topics:

• Mystery Hunt 2024
• Developing my first video game
• Wearing glasses prevents COVID
• English Ending Song, by Ryoji Yoshitomi
  • https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/AxA-XP8E.png
• How to make satisfying non-violent gameplay
  • @DJTentMode@mstdn.party

Microtopics:

• Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.
• Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.
• 47 year old house painters.
• Growing up to be a pluripotent human being.
• Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.
• Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia.
• Checking the maps on your telephone.
• Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.
• Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.
• 2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.
• Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.
• The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
• Puzzle Inflation.
• Instant stooging.
• People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.
• Server migration problems.
• Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.
• Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe.
• Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.
• Game design by proxy.
• Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.
• Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product.
• Whether the knife is detecting a dork.
• Butter golems.
• Bugs that make games more fun.
• Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it
• I can't believe they buttered Jorts!
• Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.
• Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.
• Think Buick.
• A cat that is not on the show.
• Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.
• Projectile transmission.
• Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?
• Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe.
• Wearing chemistry goggles in public.
• Myopic basketball players.
• Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.
• The Wario Land 4 soundtrack.
• Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.
• A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.
• Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples.
• Our collective dream diary.
• Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.
• Everything is impermanent, especially video games.
• A shocking removal of an important human from your life.
• Making your peace with the time you have forgotten.
• The natural high you get from blowing things up.
• Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.
• Cooking games.
• Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes.
• Watching carefully as two peaches slide together.
• Designing video games for 5-year olds on T.
• Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.
• The boy has two dads.
• What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?
• Looking for inspiration outside of video games.

Support Topic Lords

• Erica
• Ryan

Topics:

• Dog Bone Facts
• We went to Cuba
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Desulforudis_audaxviator
• https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/avoid-the-noid/
• Cancelling Texas: Praise the Sun
• My sister has played video games her whole life and somehow doesn't know about [the thing everyone knows happens in Final Fantasy VII] and I need help shielding her from this knowledge.

Microtopics:

• The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.
• Puking, but not for the listeners at home.
• The only way you can know if you're doing well.
• WavHog.
• Trying a lot of things that aren't working out.
• A chat log that's organized poorly.
• An ever-growing cacophony.
• The million dollar web page.
• Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.
• Gordy and the Monster Moon.
• Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.
• Making a noise whenever you wonder about something.
• The sound of the aurora borealis.
• The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.
• Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.
• Maintaining curiosity about things.
• Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.
• Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything.
• An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.
• Leaving through your journals.
• Tannish white hair.
• Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.
• Farms with no distinct edges.
• Cholera vegetables.
• Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.
• Putting a whole country in a snow globe.
• Tube ham.
• Drinking a soda branded "your ass."
• Knight Anoles.
• Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.
• Lord Kensingtonitis.
• A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.
• The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.
• A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.
• Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.
• All the little guys out there being interesting.
• The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.
• Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.
• Everyone's MRCA.
• Meteorites throwing amino assets into space.
• Extremely grabby carbon.
• Moldy bathtubs all over the universe.
• Little Buddy mode but for bacteria.
• The works of Florence P. Wordsmith.
• The origin myth of the Noid.
• Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.
• Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
• A layer of water that's waving up and down.
• Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world.
• Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.
• Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.
• The sun making a big X over Texas.
• Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin.
• The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.
• Checkmate, scientists!
• Solar noon.
• Grab your glasses and get lookin'!
• Meeting Topic Lords all summer.
• Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.
• Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.
• A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.
• Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
• The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.
• aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.
• Retransliterations.
• Husbands who are dead (asleep).
• The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.
• Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway.
• Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.
• A pile of snack chips fighting each other.
• Showing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.
• A priceless Ming vase that has never been perceived by human eyes and everyone thinks it's an idiot and Erica wants to save it by calling it up on the phone and smashing it.
• A big red button you can push whenever you want.
• The only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.
• Putting your first name and last name together to make a person.

Support Topic Lords

• Maxx
• Erica

Topics:

• Zines and Jam Games; stuff that's understood to be breakable
  • https://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse
• Birding in the pandemic
• Itinerant Filmmakers
  • http://www.meltonbarker.org/
• Meditation on Capitalism
  • I found the tweet that the image came from, but still don't know the author of the poem: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1100852286585221122

Microtopics:

• The Bugzooka
• Booms and busts of little insect invasions.
• A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.
• Sucking a fly through a tube.
• Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.
• Egads, Bugzooks!
• The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.
• A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun
• A bugzooka in active use.
• A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.
• Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.
• Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.
• Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.
• Whether women make better snipers.
• Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.
• Mr. Pinch.
• A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.
• A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.
• The best, most well-produced musicians in the world.
• Ways to frame game jams.
• A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.
• Indiepocalypse.
• Electric Zine Maker.
• Whether the pandemic is over.
• One of the birdiest places in the United States.
• Talk Irby to Me.
• Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.
• A Big Year.
• Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.
• Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.
• Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)
• The Northwestern Crow.
• A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.
• Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool.
• Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.
• What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.
• A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.
• Ark Music Factory.
• Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity.
• Social media survivors.
• Stardom: it's not good for you.
• Whether kids today still want to be movie stars.
• Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.
• A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.
• Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.
• One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.
• Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.
• A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.
• The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.
• Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.
• Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page.
• Do It.
• Instructional Art.
• Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.
• Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• Jesse

Topics:

• There's a Spanish word which officially cannot be written because the grammar and orthography conflict about how it should spelled/pronounced.
• My personal relationship with Disco Elysium
• Clue II: Murder in Disguise
• All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order
  • https://expatriotact.blogspot.com/2006/10/poets-corner-demetri-martin.html
• This year's beast of a Mystery Hunt
• Shareable alarms

Microtopics:

• Texans with nothing to plug.
• The Army Corp of Engineers coming to your town and kicking ass.
• No, and no.
• Fuck em, just get a laptop.
• Fact checking the dinner table conversation with your laptop.
• An interaction deemed normal.
• The Spanish double-L sound.
• Finally finding a way that spelling in English is more sensible than spelling in Spanish.
• Desperately avoiding hearing French spoken incorrectly.
• A place that is less like the rest of Canada than any part of the United States is like the United States.
• A good relaxing podcast that leads to substantial academic progress.
• Stormdancer Zero.
• Secret of Monkey Island with additional D&D stat checks and communism.
• Continents not connected to tectonic plates but instead freely floating in the mist.
• When your stats talk to you.
• Equipping a philosophical idea in your thought cabinet.
• Where the resource extraction happens.
• An alcoholic amnesiac video game protagonist.
• Finding the richest person in town to explain to you how the world works.
• Recreating all your characters from the ground up to be optimized for the game engine.
• Cheating past the final boss in Baldur's Gate because the alternative is starting from scratch with a viable build.
• Revising your thinking about the Gros Michel banana.
• Campy goofballs doing campy goofball shit except it's not Tim Curry this time.
• The guy whose name Jim can't remember who played Chuck on Better Call Saul.
• The VCR board game phenomenon.
• Scenes sort of adding up into a narrative if you squint.
• Seeing John Lithgow when nobody else sees him.
• How to get Michael Land to talk to you at CES.
• Out-of-work FMV actors.
• Specializing in loving horrible FMV games.
• The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
• DVD games vs. VCR games.
• A DVD arriving too late to save a drowning VCR game industry.
• The pride of seeing your topic grow up and take its place in the world.
• Panache, aplomb, and savoir-faire.
• Rolling, glass tanks of beverages that rocked that lined mountain.
• Women as the exception to implied maleness.
• A folk pop album featuring a disgraced CDC employee.
• 50 Cent rapping about going to prison for insider trading.
• The Topic Lords Guarantee.
• A series of interconnected puzzles that you solve as a team.
• Flavor text explaining why it's fun to solve this math problem.
• A beautiful puzzle hunt that is way too long.
• Assuming that being good at solving puzzles is the same skill as constructing puzzles.
• Waiting all year for a chocolate box that ends up being a marathon through Death Valley.
• How to test a 100-person puzzle hunt.
• Admonishing astronomers to "get good."
• Puzzles that are like tiny little gifts that open up and dance in front of you.
• A chip that controls a single light point on the wall.
• Doing something for free vs. doing it for a pittance.
• Losing your wedding ring but also your wedding ring screams once a day.
• Your screaming wedding ring following you from house to house.
• One o’clock: Time for Pants.
• Remembering that it's time for pants no matter what time zone you're in.
• The Playstation Vita's pants alarm.
• Playing a competitive minigame to see who can wake up fastest.
• Earning achievements for getting out of bed.
• The app that is the opposite of sex.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• Jenni

Topics:

• Stronger with Stogner
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o0MwD8dyko
• What is & isn't ahegao, prescriptivistly
• Wanna Feel Old? 10 Hilarious Examples Of Anti-Piracy Measures In Video Games
  • https://screenrant.com/anti-piracy-video-games-funny/
• The Lanyard by Billy Collins
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50975/the-lanyard
• The "what the fuck" genre of narrative & why it frequently has an unsatisfying ending
• Ed O'Brien on backing vocals
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWuAn6C8Mfc
  • https://floodmagazine.com/44288/ed-from-radiohead-sing-his-own-name/

Microtopics:

• Fighting for credit.
• The discord: it's fun in there.
• Forgetting an entire lord.
• A lot of work to get twice as many views.
• A convenient thing you can put old food in so it doesn't go bad as quickly.
• Gaskets: there's a name for them.
• The British vs. the American conception of a frown.
• Frowning with your face gaskets.
• Doing a cartwheel to feel happier.
• Alan Snape.
• Doing a racy political ad on top of a 40-foot pumpjack.
• What the Texas Railroad Commission does.
• Getting the idea for OPEC from Texas.
• A political ad using the Sugar Hill Gang cover of Apache as a soundtrack.
• The suburban Texan mom solving the climate crisis single-handedly.
• Twerking at the sunrise.
• Field-dressing a moose.
• Fantasy-footballing a female running mate for Theodore Roosevelt even though they didn't have women back then.
• Getting so annoyed at an ad that you have to log back into Twitter.
• Scrolling social media and getting angry by yourself.
• The crucial elements that comprise the ahegao face.
• Electronic Girl.
• The phylogeny of the e-girl.
• Is it Soup?
• Looking at Zelda's face and thinking "okay, that's soup."
• Whether ahegao or Betty Boop are sexy.
• A face that people make to indicate horniness.
• The Betty Boop ahegao: it's bad, folks.
• What is otaku's plan for us?
• Project Lords.
• A web site with JavaScript implementations of video game code wheels of various 90s video games.
• Everybody playing the free version of chess for thousands of years when the paid version is a way better game.
• Why there is no Casio Loopy emulator.
• Finding a tiny blood reservoir for the smallest blood sacrifices.
• Who wrote the Vagina Monologues?
• Moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano.
• What a lanyard is and what it's for.
• How to repay your mom for all the things that she's given you.
• God's Eyes.
• Replacing your son's butt-gasket.
• Being old enough to remember when it was normal for schoolchildren to make their parents an ashtray.
• Making a gumball dispenser in wood shop and using it to convince your mom to buy you a big bag of gumballs.
• 1899.
• A sequence of mysterious things happening.
• A mysterious TV show that ends when you overwater all of your boyfriend's plants.
• The final episode of Lost, where the giant panda shows up and explains that "I'm god and you're in my dream!"
• Comedy typing directly into the Topic Bucket.
• What makes a good ending to a mystery-focused story.
• Mystery as marketing hook.
• How to end a mystery-focused story in a satisfying way without solving the mystery.
• The most normal-looking guy in Radiohead.
• The one guy in Radiohead who doesn't have any fans.
• From the Basement in Rainbows.
• A super chill guy keeping time with his leg.
• Does Ed from Radiohead only sing his own name?
• A Pokemon Named Ed.
• Idiosyncratic ways to describe your favorite band member, that unlock your unique adoration.
• The only member of the band who smiles.
• Absorbing it all as the luckiest person alive playing with your pals in a huge venue.
• The kind of Radiohead fan whose imagination is so powerful that you can't safely let them into Radiohead concerts because they might imagine a bomb.
• The kind of Topic Lord who listens to the show.
• Having some delightful chats in Texas.
• Posing on the pumpjack where nobody will ever see you.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• Maxx

Topics:

• Freesound.org and the delight of sharing things without fame
  • https://freesound.org/people/Bram/sounds/15543/
  • https://freesound.org/people/Mrthenoronha/sounds/369065/
  • https://freesound.org/people/smokenweewALT/
• Shutting down the FF2 ARG Twitter account
• Leisure in the 70s
• Snow by David Berman
  • https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/snow-14
• The some potatoes diet
• Plants that can see sorta?
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/

Microtopics:

• The Topic Lords discord.
• Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.
• A virtual birthday party crashing app.
• Piranesi.
• A website where people post sound.
• Wav laundering.
• Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.
• Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected.
• Someone's friend pretending to be a bird.
• Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”
• AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.
• Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.
• Officer, I was just making a video game!
• The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.
• The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.
• The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.
• Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.
• SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.
• The best Wikipedia pages.
• Toe Cleavage.
• Cats who have jobs.
• Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.
• Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
• The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.
• The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.
• Who was solving things?
• New ways to not be at work.
• Another word for having a good time.
• Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.
• Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.
• Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.
• The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.
• Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.
• A foreskin in repose.
• Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.
• The concept of leisure as a human right.
• Serious vs. casual leisure.
• Project-based leisure projects.
• A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.
• Voices hanging close in the new acoustics.
• Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.
• Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.
• The Seattle Space Noodle.
• The last Burger King in Amsterdam.
• The most normal person you know.
• Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.
• Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.
• Eating 40 potatoes a day.
• Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case.
• Halftato.
• Overdosing on potassium.
• Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.
• Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.
• The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.
• Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.
• Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.
• Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.
• A forest of Max mimicry.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• The Real John B

Topics:

• The Nancy Drew Point and Click adventure series
• Advances in garbage food technology
• The mysterious grunting voice playing over the American Airlines intercom
  • https://waxy.org/2022/09/a-mysterious-voice-is-haunting-american-airlines-in-flight-announcements-and-nobody-knows-how/
• A poem I found: "The Cow" by Oliver Herford
  • https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo/status/1053873522823446528
• Klik, freeware and indie games in the late 90s and early 2000s
  • http://freegames.org/GameHippo

Microtopics:

• Other topic podcasts biting Jim's steeze.
• Spending the next hour blushing.
• Holding a Bark Mitzvah to watch your Good Boy become a mensch.
• Releasing a director's cut from beyond the grave.
• Bad games that you can't get enough of.
• Adventure games that make you feel like when grandma would visit and bring you donuts.
• Secret Fandoms.
• The new Nancy Drew series where Nancy Drew is an airhead and nobody likes her.
• A 70 year old woman playing a teenager.
• Whether game designers play anything other than World of Warcraft.
• Why the Nancy Drew adventure games are not on phones.
• Putting Nancy Drew in Fortnite.
• Friend of the show, Dropsy.
• You don't have to be an American to eat a garbage diet, but it sure helps.
• Food color technology over time.
• When Froot Loops added the fourth color.
• Speaking truth to power about the little silver disc that you microwave pizza on.
• The starchy packet that helps the noodles cook.
• A job that requires the skill sets of both a chef and a materials engineer.
• Things that come out of boxes nowadays.
• Watching meat substitutes grow up.
• Plastic golems living in your body.
• Getting your first reading glasses at your Old Mitzvah and giving a speech starting with "now I am an old."
• The second person this hour who has admitted to the pharmacist that they need reading glasses.
• The baby technology section at Walmart.
• Snot removers that'd also be great for insect collection.
• A sock that measures blood oxygenation.
• Earwitness accounts.
• Working on the American Airlines announcement system and adding strange grunting noises to the playlist.
• Electrical noise that is being interpreted by a system intended to transmit the human voice.
• The guy who does all the grunt voices.
• A sound that is like audio from a music album.
• An incredible technical smartass who got annoyed at luggage fees.
• A fridge full of snacks in the middle of the plane.
• Every passenger getting up and going to the snack pit.
• Wrestling for Cheez-Its.
• All the folks who are into weird pranks and technical glitches making a pilgrimage to the American Airlines flight with the weird grunting.
• Nancy-likes.
• The Three Investigators, presented by Alfred Hitchcock.
• Joining the discord for more on the ukulele plane.
• Back in 1901 when they worried about Peak Cow.
• Milk punch.
• Eggless egg nog.
• Celebrating all the positive ways cows influence our lives, and also we eat them.
• Whether scientists knew extinctions were possible in 1901.
• Looking for free games on the internet in 1999.
• Letting the Game Hippo domain lapse and a domain squatter picks it up and the rest is history.
• Dink Smallwood.
• A multidirectional shooter with a cool perspective trick.
• All the search engines they had before google.
• The Williams College MUD that you could log in to and visit Williams College in the MUD.
• Graal Online.
• Receiving a box of shareware from your mom's coworker.
• PC games from before developers realized that computers would get faster.
• Typing swim fast enough that you don't drown.
• Please Copy That Floppy!

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• David

Topics:

• A partnership between you and a tool
• Schmalhausen and Vernadsky, my own personal ARG
• Stop trying to make "a wedge is a machine" happen. It's not going to happen
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine
• The Poetry Teacher, by Mary Oliver
  • https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=2&poet=27&poem=5712
• Drinking vinegar
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-chain_fatty_acid

Microtopics:

• Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.
• Nap skeptics.
• Non-stop napping.
• Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach.
• Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long.
• Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.
• A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.
• The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.
• The collective politico-pandemical nightmare.
• A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.
• Ol’ Slicky.
• Tools that bring you distress.
• Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.
• A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.
• Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.
• Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool."
• Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.
• The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.
• Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.
• Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.
• Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.
• Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.
• Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.
• Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.
• Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.
• The point of games.
• The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.
• The advantages of reality over fiction.
• Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.
• The Demon Haunted World.
• Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.
• Cheers to a boring life.
• A slightly tilted floor.
• Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.
• The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.
• Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.
• Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.
• The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.
• Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.
• All the dogs arriving at once.
• Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.
• Dog Songs (2013)
• Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.
• The Wedge of the Poetry World.
• Dinging the pan to proceed.
• The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.
• Fixing an ulcer with vinegar.
• Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.
• Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.
• Butter and vinegar, together at last.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting
• Jenni plugs birds
• Jim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs

Topics:

• The System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System
• Decentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information
• We just taught Winston about "peeing in the woods" when we were going on a hike and now he wants to "pee in the woods" everywhere
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud
• Mark Rosewater designed devil fruits
• Esper says: "As a longtime (since 1999, with only one substantial break) Magic: the Gathering player, it does my heart good to hear Mark Rosewater come up. His GDC talk about lessons he's learned in designing games is really sharp stuff (if a little 101 in places), check it out sometime."
• Decarbonizing the language

Microtopics:

• Meta-plugging repeating plugs.
• Bee Movie but it’s text to speech.
• Increasing optional mask compliance by farting.
• Mass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.
• A meme that people teach to each other.
• Packing a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.
• Categories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.
• The Body Box.
• How to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.
• Organizing your entire house into the House Box.
• Using your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.
• Getting on Topic Lords by searching "pineapple on pizza"
• Social media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.
• Drastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.
• The overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.
• Going on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.
• Buddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.
• We've invented a new way to be angry.
• Repeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.
• Peeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.
• Explaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.
• Pee-ka-boo.
• Everything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.
• Taking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.
• How George Clooney gets away with poop modification.
• Taking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.
• Whether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.
• Tom Jones in his leisure suit.
• Cleaning up the lyrics to make rock and roll palatable to white people but leaving in the line about the "one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
• Whether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.
• Jocund company.
• Telling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.
• Seeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting "Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!"
• Conceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.
• Reading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying "Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!"
• Conceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.
• You can't unpee the bush.
• Finding and eating devil fruits.
• Eating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.
• Seeing a gun dog and assuming that it was a dog that ate a gun fruit but actually it was a gun that ate a dog fruit.
• What happens if you eat a second devil fruit.
• Dengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.
• The best place to contract Dengue Fever.
• Burning the candle at both ends of the day.
• Eating the burrito from both ends.
• Harvesting the bioluminescent fungus.
• Turbines on a windless morn.
• Burning solar panels as a fuel source.
• The worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.
• The Dunbar Number for plants.
• Voting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• David
• Erica
  • https://https://twitter.com/YerrikTRB/

Topics:

• Two plant families for the apocalypse
  • I choose you, Marine Phytoplankton! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton#Diversity
  • I choose you, Apiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apiaceae
  • I choose you, Poaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
  • I choose you, Fabaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabaceae
  • I choose you, Rosaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaceae
  • I choose you, Liliaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliaceae
  • I choose you, Rubiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubiaceae
• Alternation of generations
  • https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/ferns/reproduction.shtml
  • I can't believe I primed myself to think of 80s horror by bringing up Ghoulies 2 and subsequently didn't think about Gremlins.
• I got a Fitbit for Christmas. It keeps track of how many hours of the day I've taken 250 steps to encourage me to get up from my desk frequently. I've been getting up and walking three minutes at the end of each hour and continuing to walk for three minutes at the start of the next.
• Ode to Spot
  • https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ode_to_Spot
• Stonecoin
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
• Things that have not gone wrong yet

Microtopics:

• Uncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.
• The Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
• Marrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
• Picking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.
• Posting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.
• A stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.
• Using social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.
• Getting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.
• Which two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.
• Touching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.
• Taking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.
• Drinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.
• Vegetables that are technically fruits.
• Whether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.
• Leaves vs. fronds.
• The organs that produce spores.
• Finding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.
• Evolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.
• If humans didn't reproduce directly but instead spored little goblins who ran off to fuck each other and had human babies and we were like "ugh those goblins again"
• Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.
• Hard-Sporing Citizens.
• A health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.
• Muscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.
• The differing benefits of running vs. walking.
• The evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.
• Linking intention to activity.
• Walking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.
• The racism hormone.
• Why it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.
• Curing dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.
• Two marathons looking backwards through time.
• Subvocal oscillations.
• The best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.
• The guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.
• The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
• A love poem about tensor algebra.
• The bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.
• Writing a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.
• Web sites eating each other.
• Living inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.
• An alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.
• Nerdy high schoolers who exist today.
• Whether any given internet protocol is for the olds.
• Worrying about all of these cryptos.
• Watching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.
• The Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
• Coin famousness scaling by size.
• An oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.
• A flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.
• The stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.
• The guy who wrote jokes for Obama.
• Presidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.
• The inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.
• A comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.
• The number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.
• Inventing ink live on the show.
• An enormous 3D printer of clear domes.
• Baked slimy okra.
• Baking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.
• A headlamp named Petzl.
• Why is daddy laughing?
• The magic summoning word of little boys.
• An armchair fan of podcasts.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
• Abby

Topics:

• Scale modeling hacks for broke hobbyists
• Nobody should live here redux: nobody should live here either
• Anal Sampling Mechanism
• Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-ice-cream
• Andrei Tarkovsky, game designer
  • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyzFSsNQYoXBo4zjmTmncoA
  • https://www.youtube.com/c/SulMatul

Microtopics:

• Photoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.
• Wanting to depict someone as having a really excellent body without knowing what that means to them, so you photoshop a swimming trophy into their hands.
• The claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.
• An after-dinner lemon.
• Memorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.
• Playing along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.
• A cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.
• Differentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.
• Painting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.
• The downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.
• Not being permitted, socially, to carry around clear nail polish, so you get a flask and write "man juice" on it and pour the nail polish in.
• Man Juice, For Men Only.
• Finding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.
• Desperately searching for how to do something and finding a single forum post from fifteen years ago, with a single reply from the same poster saying "never mind, figured it out."
• Appealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.
• When tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.
• Ancient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.
• The scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.
• How Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.
• Transcending all human notions of gender by both using blush to make your Gundam model look muddy and using a soldering iron to make it look like it has bullet holes.
• The ways The T-1000 is female-coded, actually, e.g. taking on a child care role, but the filmmakers clothe the robot in a masculine skin for some reason.
• A beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.
• Eating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.
• Whether beavers get pruny.
• Why and how to get pruny.
• Animals that have hands.
• Otter brains: too bigs for their skulls.
• Finding out what animals have in store for us.
• Living in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.
• Rinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.
• Living in a town that has no social scene so on Saturday night you and your friends go downtown and try to track down where that shrimp smell is coming from.
• Gas fields flaring all around the city.
• A combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.
• The ability to voluntarily control defecation.
• The sixth sense that's just in our butts.
• Taking care of you butt consciousness.
• Shitting your pants once and upending all of science.
• Whether anyone poops in Rain World.
• A cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.
• Reading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.
• Approaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.
• Approaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.
• Pulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.
• Demanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.
• Needing a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.
• Whether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.
• Making a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.
• The King of Carrot Flowers.
• Busy wrists make for busy minds.
• Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.
• Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
• The mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.
• The Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.
• Experiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.
• Being in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.
• Stand-Up Tragedy.
• The cheapest way to fame.
• Renaming your PhD thesis "Anal Sampling Mechanism" so your advisor will finally look at it.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Maxx
  • @mechcem on Twitter
  • Maxx plugs sitting at various angles
• Erica
  • @YerrikTRB on Twitter
  • Erica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice
• Jim
  • Jim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t

Topics:

• Things I Chewed as a Youth.
• In which I beg Jim to use a sharp knife or at least let me teach his child to.
• Canadian floating feet: explained.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries
• Brad asks "Listening to spoilery discussion of a piece of media because you think you don't care about it, but then being convinced by said discussion that you actually would have liked it."
• Do you know off hand the tallest person you've met? And other things I wish we tracked culturally.
  • At 7 feet 0 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_MacCulloch
  • At 6 feet 9 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bird
• Egg the Arts Show
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGG,_the_Arts_Show
  • Some of EGG on VIMEO https://vimeo.com/user10049545

Microtopics:

• Sitting at various angles.
• Toilets with threatening auras.
• The butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.
• Replacing all your spices with lovage.
• How to use white pepper.
• Breaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.
• Big boy beds.
• Performatively lying on stuffed animals.
• Baby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.
• One for the baby book.
• The side number theory of beds.
• Sleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.
• Sleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.
• Staying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.
• Hiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.
• Climbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.
• Collecting pins from the collars of the men's shirts and sticking them all into the calluses of your hands and running around displaying your hands to freak out the grownups.
• Chewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.
• An endlessly chewy grape.
• The sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.
• The hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.
• The copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.
• Dipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.
• Filling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.
• Chewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.
• Eating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.
• The novelty of eating an identifiable body part.
• The Snack That Tastes Back.
• Being faced with an ice cream bar shaped like a human and deciding whether to bite off its legs first so it can't run away or bite off its head first so it can't scream.
• Not celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.
• Whether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.
• Giving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.
• The least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.
• Seeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.
• Teaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.
• Disarticulated feet washing ashore.
• Sneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.
• Why floating feet like landing in Canada.
• Never a single foot.
• Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.
• As It Happens.
• Talking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.
• Cons: loose feet.
• Lying about the quality of water.
• Turning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.
• Trying to get to Twitter Zero but some people who follow you don't log on any more so you have to find them in real life and annoy them enough that they log in to Twitter to unfollow you, but not enough that they call the police.
• Cosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.
• Tweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.
• A Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.
• Not knowing if anyone has time these days and asking the listeners to write in if they have time, but not reading any of the emails because you don't have time.
• A language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.
• Meeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.
• Meeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.
• Learning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.
• All the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.
• Moving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.
• Planting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.
• Emailing the producer of a show you liked twenty years ago to let them know that it's not online anywhere and ending up spearheading the project to archive the show permanently.
• Doxing yourself live on the air.
• A Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica
  • @YerrikTRB on Twitter
  • Erica plugs Kitchen! The Musical, and also Micah’s books: https://tinyurl.com/46k5zfnm
• Micah
  • @micahwrites on Twitter
  • Micah plugs Bermudez Triangle, “Chilling Tales for Dark Nights” https://www.youtube.com/user/chillingtaleswi

Topics:

• In praise of bad hidden object games
  • HOPAs, or Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures, made by studios in Hong Kong and Eastern Europe:
  • https://www.eipix.com/hopa-games/
  • http://blueteagames.com/
  • https://elephant-games.com/games/
  • https://www.world-loom.com/
  • HOPA Let’s Plays: https://www.youtube.com/c/YourGibs/playlists
• Better designs for the human body
  • Modularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(biology)
  • CRISPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
• When you say "excuse me" you're asking forgiveness for doing something rude, such as burping. When you say "excuse me" as a demand that someone move out of the way because you're impatient to get past, the demand is itself the rude thing, so you should have to say it twice.
  • Brood X: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22362042/cicada-brood-x-map-2021
  • Palo Verde beetles
  • https://www.azfamily.com/weather/phoenix_weather_blog/the-monsoon-monster-beetle/article_bb4bd606-0476-5c0e-ae2a-ddbe1467d9d5.html
  • https://arizonareport.com/big-black-arizona-beetle-palo-verde/
  • Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach
• Beastie Boys - Sabotage
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE
  • https://youtu.be/-TQgbVk9jss
  • Deodar Cedars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedrus_deodara
• Ryan Reynolds and the Deadpool Cinematic Universe
• Watching Shakespeare
  • The Hollow Crown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Crown_(TV_series)
  • Henry V: https://globeplayer.tv/videos/henry-v
  • Falstaff, who is actually more in Henry IV than Henry V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Falstaff
  • Hamlet in the original Klingon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF0k4qV1I1Y
  • Richard II (the one that precedes Henry IV) https://tinyurl.com/344kjjp4

Microtopics:

• Kitchen! The Musical.
• Inviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.
• Introducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.
• Running a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.
• In praise of terrible games.
• Procedurally-generated hidden object games.
• Organizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.
• Where the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.
• Using the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.
• Asking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.
• Ladies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.
• Gamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.
• Where the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.
• Clicking on something to make it go away.
• Improving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.
• The legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.
• The Modular Human.
• Plants undergoing full genome duplication.
• The Diploid Human.
• Using your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.
• The one line you remember from "Kitchen! The Musical"
• Saying "excuse me" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying "excuse me" to dogs and bats.
• Running an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.
• True bugs and untrue bugs.
• True bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.
• A reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.
• Hissing cockroaches that repeat what they hear like a parrot, so when you walk through the forest all you hear is a chorus of raspy voices saying "agh, get it off of me!"
• Brood X, scheduled for this summer!
• Brood X: Brood In Space.
• OS X: OS In Space.
• Which is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?
• What color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.
• Pretending to be police.
• The invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.
• Hypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.
• Being sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.
• Nick Cave throwing a chair.
• A poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.
• A cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.
• Whether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.
• Whether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.
• Popeye the Sailor Moon.
• Everybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.
• Accidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.
• Chill dudes in short ties.
• Taking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.
• A boss who thinks your name is Marcia.
• Meeting somebody with overlapping energies.
• Total freedom from all societal expectations.
• Setting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.
• Buying every copy you can find of your first movie.
• Watching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.
• The one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.
• Every time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.
• Who even likes Falstaff.
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.
• Re-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.
• The origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Elizabeth is not on the Internet but plugs http://oyate.org/, which puts historically accurate books in the hands of Native American children.
• Erica is already on the roof of your car and plugs Glittermitten Grove, a game which is full of surprises https://store.steampowered.com/app/536890/Glittermitten_Grove/

Topics:

• I'm going to have to ask you to leave the goat outside: driving the bookmobile in rural Washington.
  • Bookmobiles as a center of rural life: https://news.wsu.edu/2015/04/08/the-world-on-wheels-bookmobile-the-center-of-rural-life/
  • "Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too" and other hazards of driving with books, from Mark Twain’s "Roughing It": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch03
  • The Ellerbe Lawnmower Races: https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/sports/72886/ellerbe-lions-club-hosting-local-race-saturday
  • Hot Saw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Saw
• Arguing with your husband about the insects in your fridge.
  • The tiny moth that haunts Erica’s fridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracillariidae
• How do you pick an effective charity?
  • Erica's effective charities:
  • American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/
  • Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/
  • Natural Resources Defense Council: https://www.nrdc.org/
  • Doctors Without Borders: https://stories.msf.org.uk/rescue/index.html
  • Page Ahead: http://www.pageahead.org/
  • Okapi Conservation Project: https://www.okapiconservation.org/
• Erotica in the public library.
  • Elizabeth says: "The best way to find the erotica in your library is to use the subject headings in the [WorldCat] catalog [https://www.worldcat.org/]. The easiest way to do this is probably to search the catalog for '50 Shades of Grey' or some other erotic novel you know is in the collection, select the book to open up it’s library record, then scroll down to the subject headings and select 'Erotic Fiction.' That should bring up everything in your local library system. If you’re looking for a particular kink, I suggest searching for a reading list on goodreads, then checking the world catalog, located at WorldCat.org to find the library copy closest to you. Remember, even if your library doesn’t own a copy, you can still request an inner library loan- just call the branch nearest to you and ask for help. :)"
  • Menage series H.O.T. Cops: https://www.goodreads.com/series/60473-h-o-t-cops
  • Hot cops, the gay erotica series: https://books.google.com/books/about/Hot_Cops.html?id=z_4Gp2msCZIC
  • A real Tingler: Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24896554-unicorn-butt-cops
• Hiring assistants (for field biology) and then trying to live with them.
  • The Bowerbirds Hymn for a Dark Horse, written during an otherwise unproductive field season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3JoUAJv82I&list=PLOJWuc3CN303oJ_TuSjU1C4J03uAGWlgv
  • It's all tied up with memories of living in the Rocky Mountains for me, but it's a very North Carolina album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yf1v9_ZOtY&list=RDv3JoUAJv82I&index=2
  • The Bowerbirds get their own details wrong interview: https://redefinemag.net/2009/bowerbirds-band-interview/
  • Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not just about being neat: https://greatist.com/live/what-is-ocd-not-a-neat-freak#1
  • "[Passengers] always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level," and other wisdom of evenness from Mark Twain’s "Life on the Mississippi": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm

Microtopics:

• Breaking format.
• Representing Native Americans with integrity and dignity.
• A video game that is full of surprises.
• A baby who wants string cheese so much he pulls the entire handle off of the refrigerator.
• Little walking chaos machines with a penchant for string cheese.
• The story of why you don't have a phone.
• Dying of dysentery because of string cheese.
• Really getting the soap deep into that charging port.
• A giant red school bus but instead of seats it has bookshelves.
• Bookshelves with seat belts.
• A very serious version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
• A small town with a population of 300 where nobody sees each other except for once a month when the bookmobile visits.
• A literacy earthquake.
• A therapy goat that doesn't have any paperwork because you just discovered that being around the goat makes you less anxious.
• Spreading hay all over the conference room and letting the guinea pigs loose.
• Guinea pigs who are not embraced by the community at large.
• Goats and libraries being natural enemies.
• An enormous encyclopedia flying at your head every time you hit a bump in the road.
• Small children encircling the Bookmobile and chanting because they are excited for books.
• Lust for literacy.
• Removing the governor from your riding mower and driving it over an obstacle course at 90mph.
• Dividing your lawnmower races into weight classes.
• Souping up your eight foot chainsaw and every child in town immediately crying when you turn it on because your Hot Saw is so loud.
• Taking your three year old to see Jaws.
• Sleeping through Alien (1979) as a six month old shaping your creative direction forever.
• Buying a corn dog the length of your femur.
• A corn dog that is so long that you can't hold it and put it in your mouth at the same time.
• Putting down a blue tarp because it's Washington and everything is done with blue tarps.
• Covering a tarp with dishwashing liquid and then putting kids in full body rubber tubes and goggles with slug antenna and making them race.
• Making your slug race medal out of a metal that is constantly slimy.
• Negotiating getting a minifridge with your future roommate.
• The special kind of organism that can overcome a plant's defenses to live inside of it.
• A moth living in your fridge and your husband is like "that's not my moth."
• Not being able to release your refrigerator moth into the wild because you don't know that biome it came from.
• Finding out what parts of your diet you share with the moth in your fridge.
• A symphony of Roys.
• The ant colony that has entirely taken over the bathroom who are all named Roy.
• The amount of biomass required to observe you pooping before you'll get embarrassed.
• Giving a Lordy award to Refrigerator Roy.
• Whether what a given charity uses your money for is even that effective in the grand scheme of things.
• Not feeling the need to donate to the charity of the week because you've already given money to an organization addressing the systemic causes of the problem.
• Receiving more donations in a week than you have in the past 10 years and not having any idea what to do with the money.
• Giving money to the folks in the office passing the hat around, then finding out that they're using the money to go on vacation.
• Grocery stores gauging your level of disposable income by asking you to make charitable donations at checkout.
• Libraries shifting from providing people books they ought to read, to providing people with porn.
• Judging porn by its cover.
• Recommending Hot Cops without reading it yourself.
• Bodice rippers written in the 90s starting a romantic relationship with a rape, but modern bodice rippers depicting explicit conversations about consent.
• Treating every request with dignity because if you have a cranky day you immediately lose the trust of the community.
• A middle-aged woman from a conservative community trusting you enough to ask for porn recommendations.
• A feud in the garden club about the etymology of the Purple Prussian Potato.
• Coming in every week to ask the librarians how the Purple Prussian Potato got its name when it predates Prussia.
• A librarian getting through the terrible parts of their job so they can focus on the ridiculous potato question somebody asked.
• "Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol" doing what it says on the tin.
• Having to sleep in the same tent as your field assistant for months, but not being able to be friends with them because then they won't take orders.
• Calling a friend who is a manager at a food processing plant to ask for advice on de-conflicting your field assistants who are constantly blowing up at each other.
• Hiring field assistants to measure bird populations for eight months, but instead of counting birds they write a critically acclaimed album about the North Carolina landscape and wildlife.
• All these problems going away if you just had a budget to hire people.
• Having to carry twice as much water because the adrenaline jockey rushing ahead of you thinks he won't need any water.
• Measuring plants for 14 hours a day.
• LI-COR machines that measure leaf respiration.
• Coming back from your field work after six months and your friends gave up on you because they haven't been able to call you on the phone.
• The exhaustion of having to be in charge all the time because you live with your employees.
• Refusing to go to town for pizza because you can't afford to be friends with your employees.
• Realizing you're becoming somebody's dinner party story.
• Developing OCD in your first quarter of college and your roommate moving out because you don't have any coping strategies yet.
• Your time to blossom and find other weirdos like yourself, except it turns out even the weirdos don't want to know you.
• Discovering that you are crazy in your first year of college and then having to figure out how to navigate this country's broken mental health system while crazy.
• Maintaining totally symmetrical stimulus on the left and right sides of your body.
• Steamboat captains obsessed with navigating exactly down the middle of the Mississippi river.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica is @yerrikTRB on Twitter, and is thinking about birds
• Dan is @danlwarren on Twitter, and is at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (https://www.oist.jp/). His soundcloud is https://soundcloud.com/danwarren. He is writing music for Hypnospace Outlaw https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/

Topics:

• 1:58 The unreliable narrator in songwriting and/or songs where the POV character is a jerk
  • We all hope Ben Folds is an unreliable narrator in his song “Brick.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c
  • Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Murder Ballads https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmzP977za2bJ8gj8pVmOxSCBNcVZjGy6D
  • Moby Dick is bad https://medium.com/@jayshams/moby-dick-is-not-a-novel-e19e41fec946
  • George Michael was maybe not that into monogamy https://www.songfacts.com/facts/george-michael/i-want-your-sex
• 15:20 No one should live in this city (whatever city you're in edition)
  • Chitras flies and things that sting you https://indacampo.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/why-you-should-never-fall-asleep-in-your-hammock-at-twilight-in-panama/
  • Too much water all at once, monsoon edition https://www.kold.com/video/2019/07/31/watch-people-rescued-stranded-vehicle-tucson/
  • https://www.kgun9.com/weather/monsoon
  • The cheese guy in Okinawa fills in for a clear lack of cheese http://thecheeseguyinokinawa.com/about-us/
  • Richard Lenski breeds 69,000 generations of E. coli (not yeast) https://twitter.com/relenski/status/993671677748838400
• http://myxo.css.msu.edu/
• 38:51 Toddlers have incredible memories and if you put something somewhere once because you were lazy they'll remember it goes there forever
  • https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/04/childrens-memories-toddlers-remember-better-than-you-think.html
  • Here’s the AI spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml
  • AI evolves an organism that is tall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-wIZuAA3EY
• 43:20 Kaz asks: You guys talked about simulating people's voices, and I'd like to point out that there's been a lot of progress in this area. Take a look here for some examples: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation
  • That Obama thing is called Son of Strelka, Son of God. There’s a Youtube playlist here where four of the nine chapters are illustrated/animated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Any38uNUelM&list=PLw-jIvFxpgIDIlxOnvHr9rN_2TUv87Ju_
  • The album can be downloaded here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Dan_Warren/Son_of_Strelka_Son_of_God
  • The Trump thing is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGYeTmHHZQM
  • Evolution Control Committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DX4nsobHW8
  • Negativland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6gPSSYxex0
  • Cassetteboy is one of the most active and well-known people doing this stuff nowadays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI87PRgIKks
• 55:48 ANTS
  • Acromyrmex versicolor on the AntWiki https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Acromyrmex_versicolor
  • Walter Tschinkel’s aluminum ant colony casts https://www.core77.com/posts/23607/walter-tschinkels-aluminum-casts-of-ant-colonies-reveals-insect-architecture-23607
  • Strangely named ant reproductive strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
  • https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170217095939.htm
• 1:03:39 Pokemon Stay (the opposite of Pokemon Go): what's happening to outdoorsy AR games these days.
  • https://pokemongolive.com/en/post/
  • https://nianticlabs.com/blog/stay-safe/
  • https://www.pinterest.com/pin/35114072073932236/
  • http://www.birderslibrary.com/images/excerpts/kaufman_advanced_birding/empid_plate.jpg
  • https://ebird.org/news/confusing-flycatchers
  • https://www.thespruce.com/flycatcher-identification-tips-3859843

Microtopics:

• Staying inside and definitely being totally sane.
• Being on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.
• Driving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.
• Betraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.
• Singing about the fish you're going to eat.
• Listening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.
• Being deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.
• An eight year old singing a pop song about sex.
• Assuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.
• Writing a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like "/s"
• The last verse of "I Want Your Sex" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.
• Putting together a choreographed dance routine to "I Want Your Sex" at summer camp.
• Whether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.
• An angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.
• The Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought "twat" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with "bat."
• Describing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.
• A beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.
• A microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.
• The dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.
• The front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.
• The process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.
• Sedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.
• Growing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.
• Going tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that
• A subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.
• Going tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.
• A fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.
• Encountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.
• Living in the Bay Area where we have programmers.
• Resenting programmers but getting along with them really well.
• Getting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.
• Repping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.
• The power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.
• Discerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.
• Being performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.
• Cheese scarcity in Okinawa.
• Whether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.
• If Gandalf really liked cheese.
• The Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.
• Long grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.
• Being unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.
• Japanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.
• RNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.
• Celebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting "nice" on Twitter.
• Toddlers learning a lesson far too well.
• Telling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.
• Breaking land speed records by falling over really fast.
• Reassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.
• Reality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.
• Spending a lot of time trying to identify birds.
• The basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.
• Convincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.
• The growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.
• The number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.
• Doing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.
• Wanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.
• Starting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.
• Trying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.
• Being waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.
• Ants biting you with their mandibles, but only to hang on so they can sting you like wasps because they're technically in the wasp family.
• Ants being around long after humans are gone.
• Filling an ant colony with lead because humans will get more value out of a model of an ant colony than the ants get out of being alive.
• Filling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.
• Ending up in an ant lab and doing ant things.
• Studying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.
• The exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.
• Coordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.
• Asking Pokemon Go players if they're registered to vote and they answer that they're doing a raid when that doesn't tell you whether or not they're registered to vote at all.
• Trying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.
• Birds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Erica talks about birds and plants on Twitter at @YerrikTRB and wants you to listen to the Frog Fractions 2 soundtrack. https://ryanike.bandcamp.com/album/frog-fractions-2-original-soundtrack
• Justin talks about puzzles on Twitter at @firetrucknpl

Topics:

• 2:34 Children are terrifying.
• 8:41 The Frog Fractions ARG, culminating in its Christmas release
  • The FF2 ARG on the Game Detectives wiki. https://wiki.gamedetectives.net/index.php?title=Frog_Fractions_2
  • Befunge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge
• 22:02 Bringing interesting puzzles to people with boring jobs.
  • Reading with Rover. https://www.readingwithrover.org/
• 28:00 Paraphrased asks: "What were you doing before you're doing what you are now?"
• 41:38 Weird Christmas / holiday foods.
  • Traditional Lithualian Christmas Eve dinner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%AB%C4%8Dios
  • Lithuanian Christmas Eve recipes. http://www.maskoliunasfamilyproject.com/christmas-eve-recipes-and-others/
  • Vinegretas. https://www.receptai.lt/receptas/burokeliu-salotos-su-pupelemis-1455
  • Yule Sandwich Log. http://www.midcenturymenu.com/2011/01/the-mid-century-menuyule-sandwich-log/
• 52:37 Weird Christmas / holiday birds.
  • Passenger Pigeon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon
• 54:12 Incorrect plant genera in video games.
  • Plants of Star Trek. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23plantsofstartrek
  • Birds of Google Maps. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23birdsofgooglemaps
  • Columnar cacti. https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23columnarcacti&src=typd
  • Flora of the Colorado Plateau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_of_the_Colorado_Plateau_and_Canyonlands_region
  • Hecho cactus. https://imgur.com/gallery/kVXqnhR
  • Organ pipe cactus. https://www.nps.gov/articles/organ-pipe-cactus.htm
  • Cardon, the world's largest cactus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnWeiSi9s2w
  • The black bars on the left of the screen in Atari 2600 games ("hmove lines") are caused by repositioning sprites in the middle of drawing the frame. http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#general18
  • Extrasolar. https://extrasolar.com/

Microtopics:

• People who celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
• Addressing the least-served Christmas demographic.
• Muting your mutuals because it turns out you have no common interests.
• Not being sure if the Frog Fractions 2 Soundtrack liner notes exist any more.
• Your three year old opening all the Advent Calendar doors and hiding the chocolates in his Halloween bag.
• Your three year old pushing chairs from the kitchen to climb on top of the refrigerator because that's where you keep the cookies.
• Developing problem-solving skills long before you develop a sense of ethics or self-preservation.
• Your two year old deciding it's time to be a cool pirate and picking the biggest sword possible out of the kitchen knives.
• Taking comfort in only half of prehistoric children dying before the age of five, so with modern medicine and safety advances your child has a pretty decent shot.
• Half of all children dying before the age of five so they never amass the numbers needed to overthrow the adults.
• Your one year old overcoming the child safety lock by ripping the entire door off.
• Half your age plus seven being your personal cutoff for when someone stops being a child.
• 18 year olds being allowed to vote and drive and get married.
• Teenagers having infinite energy to learn and get things done, but no judgement for what are good things to learn or do.
• Describing your relationship with your high school student as a jockey/horse scenario but not being sure if he's the horse and you're the jockey, or vice-versa.
• Placing bets on the three-legged toddler races.
• Taking bets on high school track events being illegal, so that's why a Silicon Valley startup has to do it.
• Cleverly tying your collective bragging to the holiday season.
• Writing a book about the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and hiding it inside of another book.
• Making a GameFAQs-style guide to document how the game works while it's still in your head.
• Your Skype work partner probably not looking at the screen, but maybe they are, maybe they know you're not working.
• Teaching people to read by having them read to dogs because dogs are uncritical and just love the attention.
• Skyping with a dog all day to motivate you to write your book.
• Having a friend come onto the show and do a dog voice because real dogs pick terrible topics.
• GameFAQs turning out to actually have standards.
• GameFAQs rejecting your submission with the rejection note just saying "Boxing."
• GameFAQs rejecting your submission with a subtle joke about the previous game in the series.
• Actual FAQs being pretty rare on GameFAQs.
• Writing an angry letter to the New York Times about your walkthrough being rejected from GameFAQs.
• Programming languages that are deliberately constructed to be difficult to think about and work in.
• The Museum of Artifacts From Collapsed Timelines.
• Leaving your release date in the hands of the players and players deciding you should release on Christmas.
• Letting ARG audience members take over your ARG design because you're busy making an executable.
• Wanting something to be a commercial success and so hiding it as well as possible.
• Reneging on your vow of obscurity at the last second and raking in the dough.
• Not being able to put your game on sale because it would violate truth in advertising laws around the world.
• Pricing your game high because games should cost money -- but that also meaning people have to pay that money.
• Trying to convince the IRS that they've already deposited the check for the amount they're sending you a due notice for.
• Enabling your bank teller to feel like a private investigator.
• Adding quest flavor text when you ask things of retail workers so they feel like they'll get XP by helping you.
• Asking the restaurant pianist to play Happy Birthday in a minor key and the pianist just being grateful that you didn't ask him to play Billy Joel's "Piano Man" for the fortieth time today.
• Hearing somebody playing Gershwin in the next practice room over and playing Gershwin with them and them fleeing because the conservatory is haunted.
• Asking the librarian to research paranormal activity on your property.
• Tracking down the records of everyone who died in a house but entirely ignoring the fractals that may have died in the house.
• Not accepting that although some things are known, you'll never know how they're known.
• Realizing that economics and economists are dreadful.
• Luminary physicists all having killed themselves because nobody took their theories seriously in their lifetimes.
• Hiding behind freelance work because you're terrified try to to follow up your accidental success.
• Not knowing what you're going to make, but definitely knowing how to sell it.
• Bacteria just hanging out and waiting for you to succumb.
• The bacteria in your jaw being the true legacy of your life's work.
• Taking until your mid-30s to figure out how to work on purpose and not just when you're excited about something.
• Sleeping when you want to sleep and getting up after you're not tired anymore.
• Meeting a wife and coming to a sleep schedule compromise.
• Having more dictionaries than you've ever had in your life.
• Thinking your traditional holiday foods are weird until you hear about the other guy's holiday foods.
• Pagan traditions intersecting with Christmas in ways that lead to incredibly weird food.
• Thinking of whales as fish because you're allowed to eat them on Christmas Eve.
• The food you like being impossible to find in a store or restaurant because it's horrifying.
• A beet salad made with sour cream and beans and vinegar and peas and carrots and onions and a huge amount of pickles and nobody wanting to try it because it's the color of Pepto Bismol.
• Eating poppy seed soup and failing every drug test for the rest of your life.
• A puce soy milk served cold.
• Skimming off the thick layer of poppy seed fat so your soup won't poison people.
• Tiny dumplings representing food for the dead, because the dead don't need to eat a lot.
• Pirate Santa, Santa's evil brother who likes puzzles and hiding presents.
• Pirate Santa running the Christmas Puzzle Hunt to find all the ingredients for the Christmas appetizer log sandwich.
• A Yule Sandwich Log, made from hard-boiled eggs, crumbled bacon, bread, avocado, pineapple, pimento cheese, shrimp, chili sauce, cranberry sauce, deviled ham, peanut butter and a dill pickle, all dipped in cream cheese and decorated with canned pears and maraschino cherries.
• A combination of savory, sweet and salty that is pleasing even if you've read the recipe.
• A garden gnome except it's a duck.
• Decorating a duck for holidays rather than a tree.
• Two ninja turtle doves.
• Being disappointed with depictions of columnar cacti in popular media.
• Being disappointed with depictions of Atari 2600 games in popular media.
• Being subpoenaed to the Supreme Court to testify about whether an Atari 2600 video capture is a forgery.
• Star Trek either being filmed in California, or every planet in the universe having a mediterranean-style biome.
• Plants on Earth being way weirder than alien plants depicted in sci-fi.

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